Author: SparklyWarTanks

I haven’t written in a while, like written on my own time. My thoughts.  Reflections.  Life. Anything.  It’s like I’ve become complacent with my own steady struggle to wake up, get through the day, then sleep (if that even happens).  The struggle of a college senior, right?  Or is it just me?

I recently wrote a paper, however, for a class I’m taking on Zombies, Identity, and Rhetoric and this is what I wrote to conclude my progress as a Christian student in a discussion of “figured worlds” :

Where am I Now?

            While I could not write about the totality of the life changing experiences I had in college, like my trip to California in an inter group dialogue class that challenged my view on Christian dominance and hegemony in America, I can see that I’m not the same conservative, shy, quiet, passive, submissive girl I was coming into college.  I gained my voice and I started to do what I wanted to.  I started wearing nail polish just because I liked it, I’m wearing lipstick because I want to, and I wear bracelets and necklaces and not because I particularly want to be rebellious and obnoxious to my original religious views, but simply because I can.  Identity is something I create, and although I still wear skirts because I feel most comfortable in them, I was and still am able to compromise what I was taught before and what I’m learning now to create a new me that is not afraid to stand up for my womanhood or my spiritual beliefs. I am because I say I am and no one can make me feel guilty about who I am or who I choose to be.  One important lesson I’ve learned at Syracuse, especially through writing, is you can bandage up your own identity wombs that made you feel uncomfortable before.  You can create and re-create and re-create again who you are until you are 100% sure that this is who you want to be.  The only person in charge of you is you and whatever ideology you want to live your life by, whether it’s institutional religion, simple meditation, yoga, being “spiritual,” then it’s all up to you.  I no longer want to be religious in the sense that it will dominate my life in ways that makes me feel that I’m not and can’t be in control of myself and my decisions, but go by my own ideological views that represent who I have become as a compilation of who I was and who I am now.  I declare my womanhood my own, my belief in God as my own, and my identity mines to build.  My figured world is both complex and diverse just as my identity is a combination of all the aspects that is purely me.

Reading it over and over again I laugh at how bold I’ve become.  I’m not longer afraid to mold my identity on who I’m becoming and declaring my own voice and independence daily. Although I find myself in a panic often because I’m challenging what I’ve been taught to accept as true and authentic, I learned that it’s okay to be who you want to be and decide for yourself whether something is “right” or “wrong.”  The development of morality and moral decision making cannot be someone else’s progress made for you but one you have to judge for yourself.  Now that much of us, those 90’s babes, are becoming adults, its important to be mindful and active in how we see our own self-development, morality, spirituality, and ideological views.  We as a generation have a powerful role in the progression of this country.  Working on ourselves, becoming knowledgeable, and constantly understanding and opening our own perspectives is pivotal.

Although I’m in a state of transition and at times uncomfortable,  frustrated, and anxious about my change in ideological and spiritual perspectives, I’ve learned so much about who I am and who I want to be.  Finding worth and purpose in myself has been the hardest most draining most trying thing I’ve ever had to do, but I know it’ll be most rewarding in the end.

I just have to keep progressing and stop hindering my own breakthrough.

Dear 2016,

It took me awhile to talk to you because you didn’t start how I hoped, with the struggles of everyday anxieties and the pressures of deadlines, the fear of failure and the rawr of my daily worries, I stood silent.  In disappointment.  I thought you’d be different.  You promised me a engagement ring of change, but all I see if everything I left before 3 days before yesterday.

Can I do this?  Another year to do my best and hope for a better tomorrow, today.  To live in the moment and not in the  stresses of what tomorrow,  next week, next month, next year…2016.  I mean, I want you to be good to me.  I want the rain to turn into broken clouds, a pink and yellow sunset. I want the hard nights into content mornings, mornings of gratitude and positivity…2016.  In the pursuit to change the world, but the first frown to turn upside down is my own..2016.  I want to leave all the baggage and excess pain, the dry scabs and open wombs in the year before.  I want to declare the shedding of my dead skin into a new and fresh awakening 2 0 1 6!

2016 I want to wake up and be who I imagined.  The one who is not afraid or ashamed to look at her naked body, to declare that she is beautiful in all of her weights and bandages.  All that she has covered, unraveled in its exposure.  Please 2016 listen!  I have to be different then I was when the 4 became a 5 because this 6 is whats going to change my life TWENTY SIXTEEN!  Where everything I’ve been confused about will suddenly become clear, like that epiphany that scares you because everything has been right there.

2016.  The year I have to be different.  Something that I’ve never been before.  Happy in my own body, my own mind, not agitated at all the work that needs to be done, but 2016 you’re just a year.  A continuation of my life and my stresses, my struggles, my heartbreaks, my pain, my sadness. You are not.  You came unexpectedly as I watched the 59 turn to 00, the yells of a new year.  What now?

My stomach turned as new goals and motivations just overflowed out of my head, but my body didn’t move.  Like a new born baby I wash forced into a new world, unfamiliar, where I’m expected to make something of myself out of the nothingness that I see PLEASE 2016.

This year that 6 will be the 6 things that I will see blossom out of the dry cracked dirt.  The me that overcomes and removes all the weeds around the rose…2016 will be the year that I am reborn into something I’ve never seen.

I can’t be who I’ve been and I can’t continue to living as if I haven’t been given the gift of individuality, independence, and opportunity.  I can’t go back now because you’re already here…2016

Sincerely,

A Broken Tank